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Saturday, May 5, 2012

Normally I like the Christian Science Monitor as a unique fixture in the US, comparable to Al Jazeera. But sometimes it releases stories surprisingly soaked in Western chauvinism. This is one such example:

"Marx provided the intellectual foundation for an array of regimes that at one time governed nearly half of Earth's population.These regimes were, for many, a long nightmare of state terror, genocides, deportations, extrajudicial executions, forced labor, and artificial scarcity, crimes that left tens of millions of people dead and deprived many more of basic dignity. But while Marx's solutions are widely and rightfully condemned, his analysis still resonates among workers and intellectuals alike around the world." -Karl Marx: 10 Great Quotes on his Birthday, Eoin O'Carroll

Of course, the article is incorrect when it says that Marx's suggestions are "rightly rejected" after insinuating that the fascist regimes using his namesake followed them. It's pretty simple to see that worker control wasn't even tried by the prevalent regimes in question, which was basically the only suggestion that Marx made. Furthermore, most of the quotes are clichés: vampiricism of capital, the opiate of the masses, and similar quotes that have been emphasized for their rhetorical value more than the value of their inherent analysis. Omitted are quotes like this: